Indonesia to resume executions

Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office announced today that in July, after Ramadan, sixteen unidentified death row inmates will be executed, ending a brief hiatus it bizarrely attributed to economic difficulties now resolved:

We could not do it earlier because the government was trying to improve our economy, but now we will take some action after Eid

This will alarm wellwishers of Lindsay Sandford, whose Britishness and grandmother status have invariably accompanied her name in news reports since December 2012, when she was sentenced to death for bringing cocaine into the country.

Amnesty International says executing drug dealers breaches international law which, it argues:

restricts the use of the death penalty to the “most serious crimes” – generally defined to include only intentional killing.  (Amnesty Press Release, October 8, 2015)

I don’t want to see Sandford or any drug seller executed (though I might be persuaded to make an exception for Martin Shrkeli and his Big Pharma ilk). I deem Prohibition the real villain. But Amnesty’s argument is a softball Jakarta will bat away with ease when its leaders – like those in London, Washington and pretty much everywhere else – insist that drugs kill, while waging an incredibly expensive, socially toxic and demonstrably unwinnable war on them. Malaysia has in the past accused the west – justifiably in my view, and on more than one count – of hypocrisy over its use of the gallows on drug offenders. So too will Indonesia. Is we or isn’t we fighting a “war on drugs”? If we is, and on the ground that drugs kill,  why on earth wouldn’t we have the death penalty in the arsenal?

(Actually that question is easily answered empirically, on the ground that executing dealers has not choked off supply lines. And easily answered logically: one predictable effect being to raise street prices, hence the profits from which mules like Lindsay Sandford are coaxed into risking all. The problem for those who like Prohibition but not hangmen is that they are debarred by the former from using such arguments against the latter when they apply equally to their preferred alternative of long jail stretches.)

But half baked thinking on Prohibition is not confined to those who defend it. Its catastrophic defects hardly make Sandford an innocent when she brought cocaine to Indonesia because of it. How else could a leaf from the Andes, widely cultivated and easily refined, pay so well? True, it’s likely she worked for smarter types who stood to gain more, and for less risk, but my point – that dealers in outlawed drugs have every interest in their staying outlawed – is not diminished by the fact small fry always take the fall. Maybe the messianic end of dopeheadery is just too spaced out and tunnel-visioned to grasp that their Legalise It dream, though cautiously shared by the likes of me, is not shared by those who keep the supply chain open.

That Sandford is in the sights of a firing squad dismays me – the more so when her prosecutors had wanted a twelve year jail sentence – though she may, for reasons of realpolitik rather than mitigation or selective compassion, escape that fate. But at risk of sounding harsh even while stating the blindingly obvious, she has  brought this deeply unenviable situation on herself.

See also my post on Indonesia’s executions of drug offenders last May – they shoot mules don’t they?